


In Violation of Copyright

by Mithrigil



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Caper Fic, Gen, Heist, Horror, Meta, Post-Canon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-24
Updated: 2010-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-11 06:07:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've pulled off Inception, and had some time to regroup—but what's the next step where the exchange of ideas is concerned?  (The answer: Intellectual Property.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Violation of Copyright

**Author's Note:**

> No authors, living or dead, professional or otherwise, were harmed in the construction of this story. At least not as far as I know.

"Then why don't we make him think he came up with it?"

Of course it's Eames' idea. Eames is a fan. Arthur is entirely unsurprised.

"We've done it before," Eames goes on. The workshop in New York is extremely well-lit and, in Arthur's realistic opinion, indefensible. "The rest of it is a matter of extraction, nothing more by half."

"Except the part where it's someone else's idea." Yusuf speaks up first. Arthur's not thankful, but lets the conversation flow. "In order for this to work, we can't touch the idea. Or even confirm its strength."

"Or compatibility," Ariadne adds. "What if it turns out to be something our client can't use?"

Their client, according to Arthur's reconnaissance and Saitoh's explication, if not precisely in that order, is bestselling author C.R. Nottingham. Both the C and the R are false, but the Nottingham is real. It provides Eames and Saitoh with a measure of amusement. Arthur just wondered what kind of symbolism-obsessed bastard was writing this script. Possibly Nottingham himself.

Dom scoffs. "Honestly, if that man managed to write and sell an entire series of books about government conspiracies to poison string cheese, I doubt there's an idea he can't write."

"The string cheese was only in one book," Eames says. "And it was an allegory."

"The point is, the man's a hack." Arthur looks under his eyebrows at Eames. "And it's a valid point. We don't even know if he can use the idea after we plant it, even if it takes. A good idea doesn't make a valid execution."

"Spoken like a kindred spirit," Eames says, and Arthur doesn't have to roll his eyes to see the smirk across Eames' stubbled jaw. "You can't fake an imagination, otherwise we wouldn't have _you_."

"Namely someone who is entirely comfortable using what's in the minds of others."

"Well then you and Nottingham should get on famously."

"Whether he accepts the transfer or not, all the component operations can be done," Dom interrupts, which Arthur praises inwardly as a good sense of narrative, not to mention professionalism. "We can extract an idea, we can conceal an idea, we can plant an idea and make Nottingham give it to himself. It's not exactly simple. It's never simple. But it's possible."

Saitoh nods. He's standing opposite where Dom is pacing, everyone else sitting in chairs wheeled to all angles. (Arthur has been drawing trajectories between them for the last ten minutes.) "Mr. Nottingham's representatives are willing to pay for the possibility. Mr. Nottingham does not, and cannot, know about the installation."

"Neither can whoever we extract from," Ariadne says. "We'd have to keep them separated the whole way down."

She gets up and goes to the dry-erase board, which everyone has to face now (except Dom, still pacing, and Arthur is counting the song for him in his head, first in four at quarter-equals-sixty, to equals dotted quarter, to eighth equals one-eighty, eighth never equals eighth). She picks up the nearest pen and uncaps it. "We have to take Nottingham down at least—" _Squeak._ That pen leaves nothing behind on the board. Ariadne shakes her head and picks up a new one, orange. "We have to take him down at least three levels." This pen works, and she draws;

  
____spacer____

"For the extraction to work, we have to take the person we're stealing from down two;

  
____spacer____

"And for us to make the transfer, since you can't bring an idea into the real world, if you can make it take a tangible form at all, both the level ones have to be the same place." She erases both of them and puts a new one somewhere between the two columns;

  
____spacer____

"And that's also going to spread us out," Ariadne finishes. "At least one person has to be kicked out of two-prime to bring the idea to Nottingham's path, and then get put back under."

"And someone has to stay with the person we're stealing from after the heist. That means different levels of sedation in an otherwise shared dream." Yusuf considers, curling his fingers together but only pulsing one of them. "It _can_ be done."

"We have enough people for all the levels." Ariadne is staring at the board again, pen in hand, leaking its toxic scent into the air. Arthur pictures her drawing neural networks and smiles. She taps the pen tip onto the board a couple of times, then adds an R over the 1 and turns all her lines into arrows. "If it's that delicate, Yusuf has to be present all through two-prime, which means sending _three_ people into two-prime besides the subject."

  
____spacer____

"And one of them has to be me," Dom says, and stops pacing (Arthur has managed to subdivide the quarters into quintuplets) to join Ariadne at the board. "It's my dream. I steal the idea, pass it off to Yusuf and whoever gets to carry it down Nottingham's path, and stay there with the subject until you kick us both up."

Dom doesn't go past the second level any more, and it's taken him eight months to get even that far. Arthur calls it prudence. He doesn't listen to what anyone else calls it.

"Which means I'm the third man in this company." Eames waves to Dom, who has taken the pen from Ariadne and added his name to the arrow. Dom adds Eames' too. "I'm the only one who can carry it down."

"No you're not," Arthur says instinctively.

It's a bad idea. "Fine, not the only one. Just the best." He swats the back of Arthur's chair. "Stick to what you're good at, Darling, that's why you're here."

The flowchart reads;

  
____spacer____

and Dom still has the pen.

"It _is_ why you're here," Dom says, but at least his smirk is more private, more effacing than aggressive. "We need you to run with our ideas."

-

The conductor hands Nottingham back his ticket. "Transfer at Croton-Harmon." Nottingham nods and goes back to basking in the glow of his laptop with his hands poised impotently over the keys. _Of course it's a Mac,_ Eames thinks, and continues to hide behind a copy of Nottingham's own _Following Eyes_. It's actually rather boring the second time around. Brain popcorn gets stale too, it seems.

After a few more glares from the sun shining on the Hudson river, unmitigated by the plexiglass windows of the train, Eames gets up and stretches, tight below the belt. "Hey," he says, affecting a New Yorker's tone (as close to generic as is possible for a city with nearly as many accents as bloody _London_), "could you watch my stuff a sec?" He puts the book down on his suit jacket, deliberately.

He gives Nottingham a moment to glance at the book, waits for wistfulness or recognition or ire or—

"Hey. You're him!" Eames leans over the off-blue vinyl seat. "You're C.R. Nottingham. Holy shit, I wish my partner was here, he loves you even more than I do!"

Nottingham's skin is too dark to blush, but by that expression he probably doesn't anyway. He says, "Thanks," with a kind of self-deprecating shyness that isn't genuinely either.

"Do you usually take this line? I thought you were back in Canada, I had no idea you were still in New York."

"I'm spending the summer in Westchester."

"Awesome, is it for research?"

"I don't know." That sounds true, so Eames doesn't press it, in or out of character. "But I do enjoy the quiet," Nottingham goes on, looking back at the computer. An old document is up, long, and evident, and complete. "Maybe something will come of it."

Eames nods, eagerly. "Maybe. Hey, um, I do have to, uh, go, but when I come back will you sign my book? Seriously, Bradley's your biggest fan, and he got me hooked too."

"Sure," Nottingham says like he expected just that, and fishes in his laptop case for a pen. "To Bradley and...?"

-

"Mervin?"

"Milton was too obvious," Eames says, propping his feet up on Arthur's thighs for all of two seconds before Arthur shoves them down. He smirks. Arthur would call it insufferable if he hadn't endured it for so long already. "At least to an American."

"He's Canadian."

"He's more American than I am." Eames slides Arthur the book a little more pointedly, tapping his fingers on the signature on the inside cover. "Get your graphology on, or whatever it is you do on point." Just for show, he lifts his knees, bringing his feet up on their shining snakeskin toes, and executes a _port de bras_ in four-and-a-halfth position.

Arthur takes the book. He hasn't quite gotten to this one yet. Nottingham has published sixteen books and twelve short stories, and Arthur's read about two thirds of the way through all of them in a week. Honestly, the rest of the work is much more interesting. Nottingham's plots are, generally, whodunnits with the _duns_ and the _its_ shuffled through, whostoleits, whokilledits, whoinfectedits, whoreanimatedits—well, only one of those—and the _its_ range from an unpopular senator to the aforementioned string cheese. Currently, he is reading a whonukedit. He suspects China.

"So," Arthur says, proceeding to use the book as a coaster for his bottle of mineral water, "tell me about your hero."

Eames laughs. He's dropped the mocking ballet to sprawl in his chair, doing a peculiar swivel that moves the wheels without apparently jostling the seat. Arthur is briefly captivated. "First off, he's no one's hero, least of all mine. Sure I like the books—they're a good read in airports, and when you're coming off a job that actually used the rest of your brain. Some people knit. I read pop horror."

"You say _knit_ like it's a bad thing."

"Let me guess, your grandmother taught you."

"Actually, I don't know how at all." Arthur admits, though, "I like to watch. Old ladies on busses somehow manage to look like they've gone over to Buddha when they do it." Besides, if Eames is as thorough as they both know he is, he knows precisely what Arthur does when he's bored. But this isn't about boredom.

Eames gives him a smirk that wrinkles in enough at the top to quantify as a smile, with a decent enough margin of error. "C.R. Nottingham. His real name's an open secret—the first two short stories were published under _Alexander Nottingham_. Most people think the C.R. comes from _Christopher Robin_." Eames is fiddling with something in his pocket, probably his totem? Does he have one now? Arthur concentrates on Eames' face. Propriety is propriety. "Born in Vaughan, near Toronto, started his humble career as a janitor at York University and probably would have been promoted, except an American publisher bought _The Next Tallest Elm_. Suddenly the bloke finds himself living in Upper Manhattan in the eighties with a new life complete with wife, kids, and yearly book deals. It's a wonder cocaine never found its way into the mix."

"Never?"

"Not his drug of choice. Hospitalized for alcohol poisoning four times, twice in the last year. Ours will make the fifth. The first two didn't stop him writing. At this point, only the fans notice, considering he shits out film adaptations. His representation's paying us in royalty percentages instead of hard cash for a reason."

Arthur makes a few interpretive mental notes on how to find the author in the book, how to determine whether it's conscious or referential.

Eames is still fiddling, but the magical swiveling chair has ceased to be magical, just swiveling. "So, that's enough for a primer. What have you found _en pointe_?"

"Things we should anticipate in Nottingham's subconscious," Arthur starts, after a gulp of water. "Locomotion, French art deco, and predictable twist endings."

-

After a week, the chart looks like this;

  
____spacer____

the obnoxious orange dry-erase marker having run out of ink on day six, or between, when someone forgot to cap it. Back at the hotel, Dom's shoes are still soaked through from running out to get new markers yesterday. Ariadne is back at the chart, penning in her own name right at the top.

"On any level that both the subject and Nottingham are on, we need at least two of us to keep them separated," she says, putting the pen cap in her mouth and capping it that way. "One of them's Arthur—but Arthur can't stick by Nottingham if we need him to believe level one isn't a dream. I'm the other one by default, but if we play it straight that's going to cause problems when I follow Nottingham down the other two levels. There are two ways around it."

"The first one's that you put all our work on Miss Charles to some good use," Dom says, then waits to make sure Ariadne comes to the correct conclusion on her own.

"Level one is too sensitive for that." She smiles. She knows he's testing her. Good. "The way around it would be to take this down to the same level two, merging two and two-prime, but that would pit Nottingham against the subject and actually make things harder."

She looks rather pointedly at Eames, and rubs a twinge of saliva off the marker cap. Dom is reminded that Miles told him Ariadne was _better_.

Eames laughs. "If you wanted to learn a little forgery, love, you could have asked."

-

"Her name is Inoue Miyu." Saitoh pours Arthur coffee out of a French Press. The way he does it, Arthur expects Saitoh to mix the aspartame in _for_ him without asking how much. "She is an Administrative Assistant in the New York branch of one of my companies. You do not need to know which."

It turns out that Saitoh doesn't mix the sweetener into Arthur's cup, but he does pull his hand away to reveal the correct number of packets. Arthur accepts the French Press from Saitoh with one hand and goes for the weighted die in his pocket with the other. He pours. "Why her?"

"I know that she possesses a wealth of ideas." Saitoh drinks his coffee black and, as it turns out when Arthur is done pouring, in very small sips as if he expects it to be stronger. "She is so rich that she has been using company time and resources to invest them."

"This would be a very different heist if I took that literally."

The die in Arthur's pocket feels right, the dimples and the heft line up, but he won't roll it here to check. He lets it back into his pocket and starts tearing apart the packages of aspartame, all three at once, over the still surface of the coffee.

"She is writing fiction at her desk," Saitoh says, "most of it not for publication. Her time at work is spent online with a group of similarly unpublished writers and bloggers. I have no doubts as to the extent of her imagination. One idea, even a powerful one, would not be missed."

There's a spoon. Arthur picks it up and stirs the coffee. The windows of the office shake once, powerfully—a pigeon has just dive-bombed it and falls on top of the air conditioner, unconscious or dead. Arthur and Saitoh _both_ stare at that for a moment.

Saitoh drinks another sip of coffee. "She will also be easy to deceive and subdue, in reality and level one. I have noticed that to be true of people with exceptionally vivid imaginations."

-

"The first thing you have to wrap your mind around is that Forgery is Architecture of the self." They are walking in a dream—neither of theirs, to be safe, Yusuf is testing his compound for duration on Dom and Eames just thought to kill a couple of birds with one stone—and Dom has given them a little too much to work with. Eames takes Ariadne by the wrist, thumb at the small, and leads her out of the projection-filled elementary school auditorium and into the lobby. It is covered in tiles that beg in some particolored way or another for world peace. Only the two teenaged volunteers manning the snack table for the school play are out there, and they pay Eames and Ariadne no mind at all. "That's how I caught on, at any rate. I was an Architect first."

"I thought we were all Architects first," Ariadne says.

Eames smirks. A pair of doves on the painted tile wall pull their olive branch a little tighter. "Have you ever built a character?"

Ariadne thinks about it a moment, then nods.

"Who's the most recent?"

"French class, I think. We have—had, I guess—to write skits to practice grammar and present them in front of the class."

"Have you latched on to any archetype in particular?"

"Other than the American Exchange Student who doesn't know anything?" She laughs, plays with the collar of her shirt. "Last time I played the receptionist at a hospital. We learned all the vocabulary for socialized medicine."

"God bless the education system." Eames gives her a little shove toward the near bathroom doors, opposite the auditorium and the little folding table with teenagers and tupperware. "I want you to walk out of that WC as a French medical receptionist. You have ten seconds."

Ariadne, evidently, assumes that the ten seconds start now instead of from the moment the door closes, because she scurries off like she's just been swatted on the bum by a nanny. (Eames considers conjuring this up at a later scenario.) Eames counts to ten, not caring precisely how long the seconds are, and has his eyes on the door when Ariadne emerges from the bathroom.

She says, in confident Parisian French, "I am sorry, but we do not accept your insurance card here."

The teenagers shriek in fear and throw cupcakes at her.

"A little too 'French'," he tells her, once he's kicked himself out to catch up. "Too much archetype, not enough article. Your characterization was incomplete enough to be a Matisse."

-

"There are a couple of ways I can do this," Yusuf is explaining, and only to Dom, because sometimes things work that way. Dom's kids adore Yusuf. They'd still be climbing all over him and pulling his hair if Dom hadn't put them to bed. (James wishes his hair was curly. Dom remembers that when James was really small, just born, it _was_, and Mal would wind each curl around her fingers to train it. Sometimes after long car rides or picnic afternoons the boy would look like he just stepped out of the Italian Baroque.) "No matter which, I have to conceive of the sedatives without dreams to conceive of them within. I think it's a little more precise that way. I mean, I can build them in the dream to time off exactly as planned, but if I've never managed it in the real world I'll worry about it, and worrying about it will give Arthur a hard time on the level with me under, not to mention the rest of us."

Dom blinks instead of nodding, and traces his thumb over the rim of his glass. It's too dry and shallow to sound. "And the mixes you've gotten aren't perfect enough?"

"The compounds themselves are fine," Yusuf says. His glass is plain empty, except for ice. Dom gets up to go to the refrigerator door and fill it. (The refrigerator is filled with whatever the kids want for snacks, but Dom still hasn't cooked more than breakfast and grilled cheese for them in this hotel. They love New York, they're excited to spend so much time here, Philippa said the Statue of Liberty looks like Mommy, Dom thinks the nose is too straight and the forehead's too unmarked and Mal never wore that much green.) "And I've even worked around the problem of depth and strength. If we wait, and actually set up the top level to accommodate us for _only_ a half-hour like Arthur wants us to, we won't get sent to limbo if we're killed, so we can keep using violent kicks. It's the method of distribution that has to change. Either I have to wire the PASIV on level one so that you get the lion's share of the dose and stay under until we kick you, or I have to sedate you additionally before we all go under together and let the PASIV just make up the difference."

"So lay down the pros and cons."

"Well, the con gets laid down either way," Yusuf says with a smile. He takes back his glass and drinks almost all of it. "If we give you half of the sedative before everyone else, you're out for most of level one, and if I'm administering it that leaves me out too."

"Not that you all can't handle it on your own," Dom says.

"Not that we can't. But it's always better if we don't. The fix for that is if I minimize the time you have to spend under and just hit you with something like we did to Fischer on the plane. If I make it slow-acting enough, I mean."

"And the cons of the other way around?"

"It means that Arthur has to spend a lot of time monitoring the dispersal of the sedative. It's not just a matter of making your IV a little wider than the rest. There's a reason you don't try to take out a cheetah with an elephant gun."

"And because we're leaving Arthur and Ariadne up there alone, and Nottingham's the subject, he's not going to have much time to watch. I get it."

"I mean, Arthur can do it," Yusuf says. There's only ice in his glass, but he tries to drink the dregs anyway. Dom just holds on to his glass. "And he will if he has to."

"But telling him to do it from the start means he'll do that and a thousand other things."

"It's what he does best."

Yusuf chews on his ice. Dom is glad that the kids aren't watching, it might make them pick up the habit.

-

"Use a different color."

At Arthur's—well, it's not a request, and he's grateful Eames acknowledges that—Eames switches out the blue marker for the green. He puts the cap neatly in the insert at the back of the pen. Arthur watches it twist. "Time in level one, half an hour at most," he says, and scrawls it in at the corner of the 1. "Actually, no. We have to reckon this by how long Dom needs to extract and transfer."

"Level one's going to scare the subject up, no matter how careful we are," Dom says. "An hour under, all three of us. Once you leave, I'll just stay."

Eames markers in, 00:01:00 next to 2-prime. "That subdivides into—"

"Three minutes on level one," Arthur says, tipping back his chair and not looking up from _Courier 56_, "and if you think we all need half an hour on level one and give us ten minutes to get two-prime set up, Dom should be prepared to stay under for another five hours and forty minutes."

Eames throws the pen at Arthur. It leaves a streak, presumably green, down Arthur's left temple.

_Fine_. Arthur closes the book, un-tilts his chair, and goes to the board. He erases everything Eames wrote so far—his handwriting is illegible anyway. He doesn't bother to check if Eames is smirking or scowling. Eames can probably manage both at the same time, or maybe there's an expression that has both meanings that Arthur can't describe.

Arthur writes, and says, "Thirty minutes on level one, less ten for establishment. That should be enough to get us on both paths. Three minutes under at level one for an hour at level two-prime to conduct the extraction on two-prime, and seventeen minutes equals five hours and forty minutes grace for Dom to stay there. Two minutes to make the transfer on one, leaving fifteen maximum equating to five hours maximum on Nottingham's two, of which you need how much, Eames?"

"To talk him open? Two hours."

"Six minutes on level one, two hours on level two, leaving nine on one, three grace hours for Yusuf on two, and you and Ariadne a maximum of sixty hours on level three."

He counts backward.

"Which leaves you alone with Nottingham for thirteen minutes before we put him under, Ariadne. Twelve if he cooperates."

"I never get tired of watching you do that," Eames says. "What's next, a reading of the phone book?"

"Starting with the Fs and skipping to the Us." Arthur keeps writing.

  
____spacer____

He licks his fingers and tries to rub the ink off his cheek.

-

"Good evening."

Eames is no longer alone in a white room with no windows, just a one-way mirror he's on the wrong side of and an open door into a dark hallway. His interrogator comes around to the long side of the rectangular table that Eames has his cuffed hands propped on.

Said interrogator is a distinctive redhead, with the authoritative sensibility that was fetishized in film noir and that people still make the tragic mistake of falling for in real life. She wears a cobalt tweed skirt-suit that reminds Eames of Saitoh's samurai-bespoke more than anything else, except for how columned her body is. Eames will pick at the sartorial choices later. "Is it evening?"

"It is what I say it is," she says. She sits and arranges several files, and he sees why she picked the long side of the table to lay out the charges. "Detective Lafayette, FBI."

"That name's going to give him pause, love."

"We can change it," Ariadne says in the one-way mirror. "How's the rest?"

Eames lope-crosses his legs beneath the table, drops the handcuffs, and prepares to wait another ten seconds for her to change. "If you're going to keep that hip-to-waist ratio, wear trousers."

-

"What does she write?"

Saitoh slides Dom, Eames, and Yusuf matching files in ice-blue sleeves. Arthur already has one, which Dom can see he is reading with about as much gusto as the endless hail of Nottingham. Dom just opens his own set. Saitoh has included a cover page and index.

"First, here are the websites she visits. As many of these are social networking sites with protected accounts, I have taken the liberty of accessing them and including the relevant information in the appendices. The rest, she and her associates display publically."

Eames thumbs through the packet. Dom is still on the table of contents. Yusuf is laughing nervously. "She does this on company time?"

"Yes."

"Well they do say an idle brain is the devil's playground." He turns a page and chuckles. "Can't imagine what she'd do if hers wasn't swinging."

Dom reads around the text, tapping his fingers and skimming the page. "Where does she go to write when she isn't at work?"

"Cafés," Arthur answers, farther in the packet than any of them, without the faintest trace of a blush (like Yusuf's) or a smirk (like Eames'). "Innocuous ones, indoors."

Dom considers this a moment. "I'll build one."

He is aware of everyone, Arthur included, putting down the files and looking straight at him. He wrings his hands and decides, no, this is real, and they're only looking at him because he said something important.

Saitoh's the only one to actually question it. "You will?"

Dom looks him in the eye and blinks instead of nodding.

-

Arthur stares.

  
____spacer____

No one asks if anyone else is ready.

-

Miyu's computer explodes. There was barely a tendril of smoke to alert her to it. First she gasps, then she screams, and then suddenly she's surrounded by her coworkers and the clients and anyone else who can move. By the time Dom and Saitoh reach her, she's still staring at the monitor, as if she's wondering why it's intact when the tower blew. Her reflection is wide-eyed, well made-up, pale as a silk sheet. She isn't looking at the slashes on her shins at all. Blood stains her footless tights a darker black around the tears.

By the time they get her to the ground floor, the ambulance is already waiting. She's clinging to the neck of the man carrying her and crying and her hair is coming out of its bun. Dom has been seeing that style with the braided bangs everywhere in the city. They load her up into the ambulance. Saitoh tells her she'll be all right, it is his company, he will take responsibility for her and make sure her parents know. Yusuf locks eyes with Saitoh, and then with Dom, before the back doors of the ambulance close. He's already giving her oxygen.

"Remind me never to work for you again, if that's what you do to your employees," Dom says as he slides into the driver's side of Saitoh's car and prepares to chase the ambulance.

Saitoh only smiles.

-

Ariadne says, "Put him down there," so Arthur wheels Nottingham's stretcher into place, with space for a curtain between. She and Yusuf have already strung Miyu up, and Eames moves in to help Arthur with Nottingham. There's space for an entire window and hospital curtain between the two beds, and the sound the stretcher makes skittering across the tile floor would probably be enough to wake anyone up.

"Last one up draws the curtain," Eames says to the general assembled, but looks to Arthur just as he tapes the IV down on Nottingham's hand. "And the first one up checks."

"Aren't you lucky you never have to close any doors," Arthur tells him, then looks around for a chair to sleep in. Yusuf's already claimed the plush brown one by the foot of Miyu's bed, and Ariadne's moving hers into place nearest the PASIV. Saitoh's connecting her. Dom is stretching out on the floor. There is a third empty stretcher, which won't be empty any more when Eames claims it, which takes him all of the space between two peaks on Nottingham's heart monitor.

"I've slept tighter," he offers, hand outstretched, eyes squinted against the lowlight that the curtain doesn't block.

Arthur unfolds a plastic chair and plunks it pointedly down on the tile. After a moment sitting—the chair really isn't comfortable at all—he folds his arms on the foot of Eames' cot, endures a laugh, and waits for the sedative to kick in.

-

"Quite a realistic prison you've got here, Darling."

And it is, too, when Eames looks around it. Arthur is at the warden's desk, keys in hand, American police uniform circa 1940 crisp but somewhat ill-suited on his shoulders. He makes an interesting cop, Eames thinks. The hat's about the only thing that Eames thinks Arthur should leave on.

"You'd know," Arthur says, coming from behind the desk as if he's getting the office straightened out. He unlocks the door to the back hallway on cue for Nottingham's railing, _I didn't do anything! Let me go! I—I have a lawyer, I get to call him, let me go._ "How does it compare to a Kenyan prison?" Arthur asks Eames, collected and somewhat intriguingly frightening. "A Swiss prison? A Thai prison?"

Eames laughs and lets Arthur lead him along. He takes stock of his own uniform and loosens the tie. "My view from this side isn't as frequently reinforced." The complex is just that, complex, crisp and white-collar, and the projections they pass together are busy but not bustling. Eames remembers; Arthur's dream, Nottingham's projections, and Miyu is technically a tourist for now.

At the end of this hallway, Dom and Yusef are escorting Miyu through one door and into another. She's not struggling in her handcuffs and Yusuf's grasp, she's just plain terrified. They're apt to have an interesting time in her subconscious, aren't they.

"What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?" Arthur says, a step ahead of Eames when Eames was expecting a _What's all this, then?_

"She's been picked up on possession," Dom says, going along with the script. He's in plainclothes, as is Yusuf, and Eames wonders why Arthur couldn't have dreamed them both into something more fitting. Dom gets the door open. "Denies it, but said she'd submit to a polygraph."

Never mind that this isn't how that, or anything, actually works in prison, and Eames would be the first to say so. He hangs back until he's certain that he's not walking as himself, and cuts in front of Arthur to get into Miyu's space. He's read Saitoh's file, he knows what goes on in this girl's head. "Come back and check on us in a bit, Sarge," he says, muting his accent to match the image he's forged, American again, dark and a bit gentle. Good cop with an edge. "I'll get things set up for her."

Miyu looks small and wary, and stands only as high as Yusuf's chest. In dreams, her hair is undone, except for one braid in front, and her clothing is much less conservative than her secretary separates, all brightly colored layers, two shirts, patterned tights. She can't be older than Ariadne. Her makeup is smudged. It had been intricate around her eyes before she started crying.

Eames looks at her and smiles. "It's okay. You want me to stay with you?"

Shivering, she nods.

Dom's got the door open by now, and his face is all in shadow from a naked bulb and a raked fedora. Yusuf escorts her in—Arthur passes the door by entirely, nodding at Eames in the curt fashion that, in film, gets put in slow motion and set to a deep, rolling sound effect. He mouths, "Eight minutes," and sets off down the hall toward Nottingham's screaming.

Eames is the last in, and shuts the door behind Yusuf. They sit Miyu down at a glass table, the kind that's perfect for cheating at cards. "Are you calm enough to write?" Dom asks her, having gone to a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, ice-blue like Saitoh's.

Miyu sits. Her knees buckle—her legs must still be in pain, up in the hospital. "In a bit," she says, and closes her eyes, gathers herself. She's been cuffed in front, and rests her hands on the table, so Dom lays out the papers around her.

Dom says, all business, "I can get your medical information if you need it. Have you ever seen a lie detector before?"

"No," she says. She's still shaky.

Dom nods at Yusuf, who brings out the briefcase with the second PASIV and starts setting it up. Arthur's added a few bells and whistles, a heart monitor like the one in the hospital, a screen for her to look at so she doesn't see the tubes. All according to plan, that. Yusuf starts to explain to her how it works, which is close to how a real polygraph _does_ work so Eames doesn't interrupt, not yet. He makes sure Miyu can see him at all times, can get used to his posture and facial expressions, even if he's not going to keep this forge the next level down. By the time Yusuf's gotten around to giving her a pen to start filling the forms out, allergies and history and social security number, Miyu's stabilized enough that she doesn't even notice the needle going in with the patch.

Dom sits opposite her. The lighting warps only a little, but not even Eames can see Dom's face. Yusuf hooks him to the machine just the same. "Are you done?"

Miyu says, "Yes." The PASIV-posing-as-polygraph chirps, and the screen reads, _TRUE_.

"We're going to start with a couple of simple questions, all right?" The sedative isn't running yet. Dom starts, "What is your name?"

"Miyu Inoue."

"Nationality?"

"American."

"First-generation?"

"Second."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven." Well, Eames was wrong about that one, the screen reads _TRUE_ the same as the rest.

Dom makes a note on one of his files. His veins swell around the needle. "Occupation?"

"Administrative Assistant."

"Would you consider yourself a model employee?"

"Yes." _FALSE_. The sound gives Miyu a start, and the heart monitor pulses accordingly faster. Up to 120, so it seems.

"Just to be sure of that," Dom says after making a mark, "tell me a lie."

Miyu thinks a moment, and answers, "I speak fluent Japanese." It is indeed _FALSE,_ at least according to this dream.

Dom smirks and writes that down. "Is that one of the reasons you're not a model employee?"

"It is when everyone expects you to."

"Why don't you?"

"I stopped going to Saturday school when I was a kid. I didn't want to learn." _TRUE._

"What did you want to do instead?"

"Play. Write. Watch TV." All _TRUE_.

Eames leans against the air duct and listens, carefully. Nottingham's stopped screaming, and he can hear Ariadne—well, Detective Schaunard—every few breaths. He nods at Yusuf, who pushes the button and takes over the interrogation.

Dom gets up from his chair and leaves it to Yusuf. There's another chair, just within reach, and Dom drags it across the floor as Yusuf asks, "Have you ever been accused of a crime?"

"Yes."

"What was the nature of these charges?"

"Drug possession, back in college."

"Acquitted?"

"Dropped."

"Why?"

"They said if I turned in the person who brought the pot to the party, they'd let it go."

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want to get kicked out of school."

"Why not?"

"Because I wanted to get a good, easy job so I could write my book." _TRUE._ The sedative starts to kick in, and she blinks very quickly, rolls her neck, leans down over her handcuffs. The pressure on the heart monitor slows, 80.

Yusuf asks her, "What's your book about?"

She and Dom are asleep before she can answer.

-

One Escher-hall away, Arthur glares back at a projection guard and unlocks another door.

"Mr. Nottingham, your lawyer has declined to answer his phone, and so has your wife," Detective Schaunard is saying, leaning on the table with her palms spread. It gives Arthur a bit of a start. Ariadne's really perfected the character. Also, he's glad that Dom isn't running this track at all, because more of Ariadne's Schaunard comes from Mal than Dom could _possibly_ be comfortable with. Sure, the hair's red, but the cut's almost a mirror, and the face comes to the same kind of peaks just over the eyebrows. The pants are a nice touch. "Considering that they haven't answered, I think I'm being generous in allowing you to call them when you've sobered up in the morning." She looks back at Arthur. "Hello, Sergeant."

He shuts the door, circles the table, goes to stand by the vent. "You wanted to see me?"

"It seems we have a celebrity on our hands," she says, with perfect condescension. "You ever heard of C.R. Nottingham?"

Arthur gives the nastiest, most Eamesain smirk he's conjured yet. "Never."

-

"Double iced Grande raspberry latte?"

Miyu looks up from her computer, doesn't quite meet Dom's eyes, and shakes her head. She stammers. "Yes."

Dom smiles at her and nudges the cup onto what little space remains on the table. "Drifted off a bit there?"

"Yeah, I guess." She smiles, and shakes her head, and turns back to her computer. The projections at the other tables stop staring at Dom over their books and straws. The only one who doesn't stop looking is Yusuf, behind the counter, ladling ice and caramel into a blender.

Dom nods, and pulls away from the table. "Sorry I interrupted you," he says, and straightens out, turns—

—and crashes into a cold drink and an extremely attractive woman.

Mocha slush and whipped cream sandwich between Dom's shoulder and the woman's chest, and, being slush, doesn't precisely spray as much as lance through the air and splatter on Dom's face. What misses Dom's face falls, with a little architectural nudge, on the keyboard of Miyu's computer.

Miyu's consistency in having delayed reactions is a bit off-putting. She takes a moment to process, and _then_ she gets up and sputters and shrieks.

The attractive girl shoves Dom aside and starts scooping the semiliquid away from the computer. "Oh god, dear, I'm so sorry," she says—the voice is British but Dom can't place the accent, all he knows is it's not clean Received, but crisper than Estuary. "Let me get the napkins—did I get you or just the computer?"

"Just the computer." Miyu's already gone for the stand nearest her, ripped out a stack of napkins, and scurried back to the laptop. "Do you have any books with you? I need to turn it over."

"Here, sure," the lady says. She takes a large art history textbook out of her satchel and sets it down on the table among Miyu's notes. They upend the computer over the books, screen draped over the table's edge.

By now, Dom's stepped back around the counter to change his apron, and Yusuf is teasing him in character. The lady at the table—Eames, in an immaculate forge as a somewhat sticky late-twentyodd brunette with skin about the same color as the beverage down her shirt—keeps daubing at the table. She's drawing the eyes of the projections, not Dom, so Miyu believes it's real. Good.

"I really am sorry," Eames tells her. "Should I stay here to make sure it starts up again?"

"Yeah, if you want."

Eames smiles—the woman's smile is easy, a bit self-deprecating. "Same thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I was lucky I'd backed everything up. And I was still under warranty."

"I've got a couple of months left on mine." Belatedly, Miyu takes the USB drive out of its port. It blinks blue LED and peters out. Dom knows. "It should be okay."

Eames has finished cleaning up, even though there's still a dark stain down the tight white shirt. He sits down at Miyu's table, looks over at Dom. "I didn't get you too badly, did I?"

Dom shakes his head. "Let me get you another drink, that was my fault. Venti mocha frappe?"

"Yes, exactly. Thank you."

Dom ties on his new apron and goes to the cash register, listening, planning, moving imaginary customers imaginary coffee. All according to plan, thus far. Eames has caught her attention, Yusuf's passing him espresso shots that do anything but caffeinate—

—At the table, Eames' forge laughs nervously. "Honest to god?"

"Yeah," Miyu says, "You look a lot like her. When the computer dries I'll show you what I mean. I know it sounds weird, but it's like you stepped out of my head."

All eyes in the café flicker to Dom, Eames' included.

-

"You've got to be kidding me." Nottingham is shaking, falls back in his chair. It screeches on the tile and he almost keels over. Arthur takes a step forward, considers catching him, doesn't need to. "I've—I've written so much, you have to have heard of something. _Courier 56_? _Oil on Canvas_? _Eight Ounces_, that was a movie last year. Something, anything!"

"You see what I have to work with," Schaunard is taller than Ariadne, so Arthur is conscious of adjusting himself to meet her knowing glance.

"I do," Arthur says. "You want me to bring in some backup?"

"Not just yet. Get someone on figuring out who Mr. Nottingham really is."

"Okay, fine!" Nottingham shouts, bringing his palms down on the table. That probably hurt, maybe enough to convince him this isn't a dream at all. "Alexander Nottingham. That might check out faster."

Arthur raises an eyebrow. "Don't see how you get a C and an R from _Alexander._"

"Please," he says. "Look me up under that name. I have fingerprints in Canada, you can check them, anything—but I am what I say I am. I'm a writer. I'm not just some drunk. You have to believe me."

There are groans and yells in the hall. Someone starts banging on the door from the outside.

Ariadne—Schaunard—nods, quickly. "Take care of that," she tells Arthur, lets the double entendre hang in the air like a naked bulb. And then she adds, to Nottingham, "You have to calm down. I'll get you some water."

Arthur makes sure the door is shut again before he punches the first aggressive projection in the jaw. It wouldn't do to let Nottingham see that. Or the second, whose neck Arthur breaks with his nightstick and a twist.

-

"So there's this soccer player, and she's trying to negotiate a better contract and get off her current team. But her team's just been bought by the Russian mob and she finds out that's why she can't leave. She tries to get out by reporting them but you can guess how well that goes, and soon they're catching her with vinegar instead of honey if you know what I mean. There might be something to do with hostages, I haven't decided. I'd kind of like them to be all _we have your boyfriend_ or something. Anyway, there ends up being this big chase scene during a big international game. I can't decide what country it's in, Hungary or Slovakia or somewhere in the former Soviet Union, definitely, and she teams up with this operative."

"And I look like the football player?" Eames asks, cheekily.

"No, the operative. I always thought that if it was a movie she could be played by Eliza Dushku, but she's too pale. Dushku I mean. You're closer. You're not an actress, are you? Maybe I should pitch it as a treatment instead of a book."

"It does sound cinematic," Eames agrees. "A bit Tarantino."

"Get out, I _love_ Tarantino."

Eames laughs with her and tries not to think about _looking like someone in her head._ He'd tried to conjure up someone she could trust, not someone she could write. "Have you written any of it?"

"This one? Yeah, some. I should check if my computer's dry," she says, and is careful of the drinks as she lifts the laptop off the textbook and turns it right-side up.

As Miyu pushes to turn it on, Eames looks over at the counter. "Oi, is my new drink ready?"

Dom looks up, and puts down the shot of espresso he's just poured out. "Yeah, just a sec."

Oh, he heard the same as Eames heard, that's written somewhere in Dom's face. Yusuf's practically wearing it on his sleeve. Well, they can't fault Eames for being a little too thorough, now can they?"

The computer makes its requisite _bwong_ when it starts up. Ah, another Mac. Miyu sighs in relief, and toasts with what's left of her iced latte. "It lives."

Eames even gives her a _phew_ as well. "Love your desktop."

"Thanks!" Arthur had researched that one meticulously, and Eames will give credit where credit is due, later. "Can't bring it to work, so I might as well play, right?"

"Well, not like you can't play at work," Eames says and smirks. He likes this character, it's a pity she's technically not Eames' at all. "You can write at work, can't you?"

Dom comes by with a mop, a bucket, and Eames' unnecessarily girly (if delicious) drink. He puts the latter down on the table just as Miyu plugs her USB into the laptop.

"Sometimes," Miyu says. "The writing I'm doing at work...it's okay because it feels like practice, you know? I have lots of ideas. But if one of them was about to get me out of having to work at all, I'd know." She scrolls through her files, opens one folder and then another. "Lots of ideas, yeah. Sometimes I think the good ones are just waiting for me to catch up with them, you see what I mean?"

To distract her while Dom plugs a second USB in, Eames covers Miyu's hand with one of his own. They're both still sticky from the spilled drink. "More than you think."

-

Arthur crushes an inmate's nose. His uniform is short-sleeved, so the blood runs down the inmate's mouth and chin and the entire length of Arthur's forearm.

In some ways, it is easier fighting through level one projections than level two. For one thing, with a few somewhat _notable_ exceptions, resistance is less immediately lethal and generally straightforward. Crowds will suffocate you, the weather will break, and if there's fire or gunfire it's always coming your way, so the best defense is to be a step ahead. On the first level under, a dream is a dream.

For Arthur, the counting makes it harder. Not that his actions _count_, in that meaningful way, because they don't—that the only ones that mean are the ones that buy him time. What he does up here changes nothing and affects none (unless the sleepers are directly involved), as long as he gets their headphones on and their kicks primed.

Arthur doesn't brag about the kick he reverse-engineered the time they first pulled off inception.

Today, he won't brag about holding off a prison riot singlehandedly.

So when he steps over a heap of unconscious and mangled convicts to unlock the door and fill Dom's coffeeshop with Edith Piaf played twenty times slower, Arthur is not counting bodies. He's counting seconds on three different clocks.

-

Dom never quite knows how to describe what sound the sky makes—it's an assault of warped brass and evokes, more than anything else, a speeding train declining to stop for you. Either way, when it blares twice more, half as close together, Dom signals to Yusuf.

Diversion on top of diversion; Yusuf pulls the crank on the cappuccino steamer, and hot milk sprays everywhere. Yusuf curses, loud and convincingly enough that he might actually be hurt, and drops the pitcher with the remaining milk on the floor. Miyu and Eames' projection stop looking quite so intensely into each others' eyes, and are out of their seats like the good samaritans they should be.

The crowd of projections is thick enough, all surging forward to check if Yusuf's all right. Good. Dom sits down and takes over Miyu's laptop, scrolls through the files for the most dissuading and protected, for something that sets it off, that click behind his eyes that means _jackpot_.

"It's fine," Yusuf is saying, but the projections don't seem to believe it. They smother him. "I'll just go in the back and wrap it up, see, not even red."

On the one hand, Dom thinks as he scrolls through, the trauma they counted on in Miyu's dreams is entirely necessary to induce. In reality, the last thing Miyu remembers is that she was carried out of her office after an injurious freak accident. They need the fear and the chaos to make her drive Eames and Yusuf away—there, _that_ file, Dom makes the transfer to his own USB and, safely, extracts it.

He doesn't get to internally articulate the _on the other hand_ before Eames does something unexpected, but predictable.

Namely, vault over the counter and get Yusuf in a headlock, holding a stiletto against his eye.

Yusuf's mouth opens and half-closes like a fish nosing at flakes in the tank. Dom holds on to the USB and gets up, tense, conciliatory. "Miss, I don't know what you're getting at—"

"Nothing, love," Eames says, playing up an extremely uncomfortable _fatale_ that doesn't do much for his forge's femininity. "I've just been waiting for my opportunity with this dear chap." He pecks Yusuf on the cheek. "Hand it over or I'll _take_ it over."

Dom manages "You won't—" and Yusuf gets out an "I don't—" before the knife goes in.

Miyu's subconscious does the sensible thing and panics.

-

"—colonialist son of a whore!" Yusuf rips the IV out and slaps his hands over his right eye.

"That's the most original one I've heard all day," Arthur says.

"Tell that to the one I'm insulting, I think he'll be mighty pleased." Yusuf snarls and gets out of his chair, goes to the PASIV and checks a few things. Arthur knows that Yusuf is hearing the same as he, counting the beats of Piaf's anthem on this level, but Yusuf actually counts aloud, _four, three, two—_

And Eames wakes up laughing.

"You asshole!" Yusuf snarls and hits Eames on the back of the head.

"Careful, you don't want to kick me out of this one too." Eames plucks out his own IV and, to Arthur's surprise, goes to check on Dom's headphones. "This was faster."

Arthur winds up the spare PASIV tubes. "Not all according to plan?"

"No, but all on schedule." Eames pats Arthur on the back and then slides his hand up, one jaunty rub. The touch is strange and oddly reassuring after the fighting in the halls. Arthur just keeps working and counting, turns off Dom's headphones for now but leaves them on.

"What he means," Yusuf says, "is that he stabbed me through the eye and probably used that as an excuse for Dom to shoot him."

"In a coffeehouse?" Arthur asks.

"He'll try, if he catches up with me. I stole the idea—yes, I have it, unless you'd like to pat me down and check—gave the girl a goose, and ran."

"She thought Eames' forge was her character," Yusuf explains, so Arthur doesn't have to check.

"And she should be leading our hero on a merry chase through the ruins of a fallen Iron Curtain about now," Eames says, ruffling Miyu's hair, by the look in his eyes, threatening to do the same to Yusuf. "It will take more to keep her occupied than any of us anticipated."

"You've left Dom alone in the mind of a writer," Arthur says.

"I know exactly what I did." Eames brushes past Arthur to the door. "You're not the only one who can be trusted with that."

As if to prove it, he flings open the door and Yusuf shoots the rioter in the shoulder, then, takes one step closer and shoots the next one in the gut.

"He'd better be sedated enough," Arthur says.

Yusuf isn't smiling, just breathing a bit heavily and advancing on the hall. "Well, Eames just proved that it's weak enough that a murderous kick is still an option. Let's just keep going."

"Exactly!" Eames is now wearing the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police, complete with chinstrap hat, and carrying a Krag-Jørgensen moose rifle. "What does it matter as long as the job gets done?"

Respect or none, Arthur glares. "If you strain the plausibility of this scenario—"

"String cheese," Eames says.

Arthur concedes the point, but subconsciously backdates the Mountie uniform to 1933.

-

"I knew it," Dom says both in and out of character. He holds his arm across Miyu's chest and keeps her from stepping away from the red brick wall. "They're after us both. We have to get you out." He looks in the direction of the shots he fired after Eames' forge and knows Eames just took care of it himself.

"Who are they? Who are _you?_ What's going on?"

"It's not the Russians," Dom tells her, trying to bring the dream under control. "It's the yakuza. They know who you work for. It's okay, I work for him too." He hears, and disposes of, another two projections. "Remember?" he asks when the assailants stop shooting. "You've seen me with Saitoh."

Miyu gulps in air and clutches her computer tight. "—yeah. Yeah I have." Her knees are knocking together, the tights almost squeaking.

Good. _Good_, he can stall with this, run with this, and break out of this when Arthur tells him to. "Remember, Miyu, I know a thing or two about being hunted. So you're gonna have to stick close to me and do what I say, all right? I'll get us out of this."

"How can I trust you?" Miyu is whispering, but it's urgent enough to go straight into Dom's ear. "You shot Irina—"

Someone lobs a grenade into the alley. Dom drops his gun, grabs Miyu with one hand and the nearest fire escape ladder with the other. It takes a split-second mental delay of the blast to haul her up to the balcony, but he does it, even if her legs get a little reciprocally singed.

"You can trust me because I want out of this just as much as you," he says firmly. "Now climb."

She does. Dom does as well, but he's building the staircase. And the city, and the yakuza, and the plot. He can give her a story like the one he stole, and maybe she'll grow a new one out of it.

But if that's supposed to give him any peace of mind, it fails.

-

Eames can't say precisely that he enjoys watching Arthur fight. Certainly it gives Eames an immense amount of respect for the man's competence and Eames won't deny a not-entirely-aesthetic appreciation for Arthur's lithe lethality. It's something that Arthur possessed even when they first crossed paths, and since working with him more consistently Eames is pleased that this continues to be the _status quo_ and not some fluke of dreaming. He watches, as much as he can with more adversarial targets in sight, as Arthur not-quite-callously dispatches one prisoner with a pistol-butt to the skull and then kicks the new corpse into the line of fire meant for Yusuf. (How the prisoners armed themselves, Eames does not care, not now.) Eames knows what Arthur was before he became what he is, and seeing that laid as bare as a shorn sheep is too humbling to enjoy.

But damned if it doesn't make Eames want to see more, and harder, and worse.

Arthur made and knows the maze, and so he leads; Yusuf, with his pistol and the briefcase, is center, and Eames has the rear. Not that it matters with how fast they're moving, all of Nottingham's stray disbelief incarnate and converging on them like a swarm of senseless flies.

"Eames," Arthur says coolly after he steps on one fallen convict's body to get a better shot at another, "get into character. It's this door."

"As you wish, Darling." And after clearing himself a path—he _likes_ this moose gun—Eames does. And he forges it clean, because it's almost always best to hide the carnage.

"Detective Schaunard," he says once he's through the door, in Received Pronunciation as crisp as the collar of his robin's-egg-blue Swiss shirt. "I'm aware you've found a certain...Alexander Nottingham?"

"So he says." The first time Eames showed Ariadne this forge, she shivered hard enough to drop her own. She doesn't now, but there's a flicker in her reflection that tells Eames it was a good idea to prime her. Eames makes sure that Nottingham is focusing hard enough on him that it doesn't matter what Ariadne is projecting.

Yusuf steps in behind Eames, Arthur still running damage control in the hallways. He holds up the briefcase. "Where do you want this, Inspector?"

"On the table," Eames says. He leans down and gets Nottingham by the eyes. "Do you know what that is?"

"No," Nottingham says.

"Then it's fairly certain that you don't know who I am, either. Or why I'm here, for that matter. Or why you're here. Am I right?"

Nottingham grimaces and glares. "All I know is that I want my lawyer, and I'm not saying a single goddamn word to you otherwise."

Eames huffs. "Actually, I think you're about to tell us a great deal." He looks over Nottingham's shoulder, just a glance. "Restrain him."

Yusuf and Ariadne get Nottingham by the arms—Yusuf's the more dexterous, and pushes Nottingham's left sleeve up.

Eames grins. "Sergeant, get in here."

Arthur hipchecks the door. This is almost certainly because his hands and arms are completely drenched in blood.

Eames smirks so that he doesn't shiver, or do anything more evocative. "Wash up and prep him."

Nottingham chokes. "Prep?"

"You said you don't know what's in this briefcase," Eames reminds him, "a fact of which I am quite glad. That way, you won't confuse this for anything else."

Arthur, having wiped his hands on a towelette from the PASIV case, is poised to pierce Nottingham's hand.

"There's a glitch in your system, Mr. Nottingham," Eames says, all sweetness. "You're remembering several things you oughtn't, because they're not true. Not about your name, nor your books, nor even your lawyer. And we're going to fix that for you. Don't worry about it any more." He nods at Arthur, who gets the needle taped down and reaches over to push the PASIV on.

"You can't do this!" Nottingham struggles, and of course it's futile, but there's no point in decrying the effort he makes to get free. "You monsters, I'll tear you apart—"

"You'll do nothing of the kind." Eames picks up another needle and lets everyone watch it glint. "You won't even remember me."

Nottingham sobs and slumps forward in his chair and their grasp. He's out. The rest of them work quickly, stepping out of their characters and hooking themselves up to the PASIV.

"Did Professor Miles really used to act like that?" Ariadne asks him. Now that she's dropped Schaunard's forge, she looks almost as nervous by comparison as when Eames first met her.

The answer to that question is a qualified yes, but Eames doesn't give it. Instead, Arthur answers for him, only fitting since he knows from the correct side of the interrogation table. "He doesn't use Received Pronunciation."

Ariadne gulps and shakes her head. "Oh my god."

-

Dom decides they should reach the top of the building, so they do. The roof spreads out before them and so does the city, towering even higher on all sides like a cage. Dom has made it night, nearly full dusk with an absent moon, so that the searchlights of seven helicopters catch on dust as often as concrete and glass. The city is anonymous, without advertisement or landmark, and Dom stops to assemble some weapons and give Miyu time to take it all in.

Miyu is panting, bowed over her laptop like she'd lean on it if it reached the ground. She's sweat through her makeup, better than crying, and it haloes her eyes like a raccoon's mask. "All right," she says, over and over again like a meditative mantra. "All right. Where now?"

The helicopters have gun turrets, Bullets strafe the concrete and Dom grabs Miyu, shoves her down behind a smokestack. The laptop scrapes the roof, the plastic streaked white like a skinned knee. Dom makes sure it doesn't bleed after that internal comparison.

"Here, quick!" The nearest chopper has a rope ladder down; Dom waits until it's just in range and shoots the gunner, who falls so fast his tattooed arms leave blue streaks in the searchlight. "Grab the ladder!" he commands, and Miyu does, hugs it close to her chest like a cage over the computer.

He anchors the ladder only long enough for her to start climbing, barely long enough for the helicopter to lift them off the roof entirely.

-

"Your ticket, please."

The train is speeding through a blood-red void, and Eames mentally thanks Yusuf for the seasonably dry weather. There isn't a river outside, only hunched crags and cracked earth and the most dastardly sun Eames has seen outside of the Serengeti. He reaches into his pocket for his totem—new concept, that, but not entirely without merit—traces the rough edge, tests the heft. A dream.

Not that Nottingham knows. He hands Eames whatever is in hand without so much as glancing up.

All right then. "Are you so certain you want to give me this?" he says in the voice and with the mien of Miles, poising the ticket puncher over the card. It's not a ticket, here, it's Nottingham's license, the jagged beyblade of the hole-puncher poised on his photograph's eye. Eames makes sure that Nottingham can see it.

Oh, smashing. He has. And he is pertinently terrified.

Eames makes it _click_.

Nottingham lunges out of the seat and screams. If he disbelieves, it certainly doesn't show. Eames lets him try—the fellow is surprisingly strong for a man his age, and Eames allows his Miles to appear physically weak, wrestles him hard enough to make him feel the strain and nothing more. The license, Canadian and expired, glows a faint blue where the savage light hits it. The world rattles. Nottingham breaks free, shoves down the corridor and runs, tripping over the discarded bottles and paper bags that litter the aisle and failing, always, to stay up.

"You'll never get out!" Eames shouts, lets Miles' voice ring over the rush of the tracks. "The worst critics are always in your head, Alexander! There's nowhere to run at all." He snaps the hole-puncher once, ominously, for good measure. He's certain Nottingham hears it before he moves to the next car.

-

The hall has crowded so thickly with prisoners that Arthur can hear the corpses being trampled.

Arthur is left with a horde of unmilitarized but armed projections, two PASIV operating at three different levels of sedation, six unconscious bodies, and fourteen minutes maximum on the slowest clock to bring everything together. Arthur counts; seconds, feet, turns, tiles, coils of wire, slits in the gratings, pounds that a PASIV weighs. _Seconds_, all of it, in the end.

The path between these rooms can be altered, or could if it were clear. Two options, then: _clear the path and keep it clear_ is just as valid as _go around_. Either could take more time.

Arthur still knows which he prefers.

The riot will have destroyed any room it got into. Arthur can protect these two, perhaps even connect them if he gets the path clear enough. And there are others—other places only he can go, if the ring of keys on his uniform belt means anything. He just has to get there.

It may not be as easily said as done, but Arthur will do it.

(And this time, it would be easier _without_ gravity.)

He pushes the table against the door, lets it be another rattle for the horror in the halls. Four down in this room; Nottingham, Yusuf, Eames, and Ariadne. Yusuf is the dreamer, his proximity comes first. Arthur rigs a loose barricade with the chairs, slides the sleepers out carefully. He props Yusuf up by the file cabinet, head pointing toward the air duct.

He suspects the sound of the halls, that groaning and pummeling and squelching of flesh, is what blood sounds like when it wants to leave a body, what a heart sounds like every time it tries to break out of its chest. No matter what Arthur builds, no matter how stable, it cannot be permanent; the worlds he puts back together always shatter again, even in dreams. Their clocks are the same as his.

By the time Arthur gets the air duct open—predictable, Arthur considers, but definitely inaccessible and inhospitable to the mob—he has already counted a minute for himself, twenty for Dom and Yusuf. In another two he'll start counting the hours for Eames.

He'd better have arranged this all by then. So he _will_.

-

Dom strangles the pilot and pries him out of the chair. "Take over!"

Miyu definitely believes in this, all of this—she _does_, without hesitating, and puts her computer in the control console shaped precisely for it. (Who knew the JASDF ran on Mac?) She takes over the craft almost comfortably enough that Dom wonders if Saitoh has trained her for this sort of thing, and then decides, no. Dom throws the former pilot out the hatch by the scruff of his suit-without-a-shirt.

He's building so fast, he'd be worried if it wasn't instinctive, honed after years of constructing and reconstructing life. And he'd be equally concerned if it came to him as easily now as it did then. He was master of his own universe, once. There's a reason he stopped, and not only because that universe stopped _him_. The last thing he wants is a freight train dropping out of the sky, a self-made self-defeat.

Mal may be gone, and so may her reason for being here. That doesn't make Dom's subconscious, as a thing in and of itself, any less powerful. Miles retired to the real world for reasons that Dom had once considered and is only now beginning to understand. And he is an intruder here, no matter where here is.

It's exhilarating. He wishes that it weren't.

The helicopter is already soaring by the time Dom gets to the copilot's chair and leans over. Miyu is on the console; the laptop, still closed, is glowing, a white seam between the keyboard and screen filling the cockpit with shadows.

"Are we taking them down, or are we escaping?" Miyu doesn't look away from the readouts.

"Six of them, one of us?" Dom smiles and shakes his head. It sounds like dialog that Miyu would write. "I think we have to do one to manage the other." He doesn't ask her, _can you fly_, to make sure she never doubts it. "Just get me clear shots," he says, and gets up to climb to the gun turret in the back, straps on, braces his heels, and conjures as genuine and cinematic a wind as this dream deserves.

-

All right, then. Eames gave Nottingham a head start. That ends now.

Once he pulls to his feet and brushes the dust off Miles' coat, he smiles, cracks his neck to the side, and remembers the thing he enjoys the most about his profession: getting under someone's skin, in more ways than one, and all at once.

Nottingham ran forward, in relation to the train; Eames stalks slowly, one step at a time. He hangs his arms and jaw slack, spreads his chest, walks straight along the sloped and shadowed aisle.

At the end of this car, with the torrent of wind between the doors, he forges Arthur.

Not just Arthur, insufferable and competent in ties that match the straps: Arthur as Nottingham last saw him, the Sergeant, order soaked to the bone in the chaos of others. The door to the next car snaps shut. Eames makes the keys on Arthur's police belt jangle louder with each step, thickens the shadows, heats the blood on his arms so it clings and reeks.

Nottingham makes the mistake of turning to look at the monster. He was already running; now he's barreling, holding the backs of the seats and damn near vaulting over them, choking on his own screams.

Fear, Eames has found, is extremely effective at crippling one's subconscious.

Eames knows that, somewhere ahead, Ariadne and Yusuf are warping this train car into an endless corridor, seats upon seats, window upon window, bulleting through a brimstone plain. By the time they decide to contrive an end for Nottingham, a proverbial oasis, he'd drink out of it if it was his own blood. It may well be, by the time Eames runs out of ideas.

He holds the extracted one under his watch, against the small of his wrist. He doesn't dare look at what the USB has become after two shifts; whatever it is, it's definitely unstable. That burn means it might have teeth.

The train lurches, the walls swell. Whether he reached it or not, Nottingham's at the end of this car at last, prying at the door. Eames is enough in control of this that he doesn't let the door open, lets the steel do nothing but scrape and the wind do nothing but bleat. The clang of the keys slices through the air and the void it leaves sucks down every other sound, even Nottingham's desperate breathing. Eames smiles, and even if he won't in forge—not in Arthur's character to enjoy this sort of chase, oh no—it really is an effective nightmare. He reaches out, lets the blood on Arthur's arms drip onto Nottingham's shoulder—

—and right on cue, bless that girl, the transition door opens from the outside. Ariadne shouts, "Mr. Nottingham! Hurry!" in her own voice, and pulls him through. The sound the door makes snapping closed in the wind is enough to mask Eames' laughter.

This car has a conductor's booth, masked with the simple instructions for emergency procedure. The words are in Arabic but the symbols mean the same things they always do, fire, police, evacuate. Eames steps in, keeps the forge up but lets his voice be his own when he dials Yusuf up front. "How are they?"

"She's got him," Yusuf says. "She's broken out Miss Charles. I kind of wish Dom could see this."

"It'll be proof enough when we make this work," Eames says, though he can't help feeling proud of the girl as well. "Can you toggle with the intercom so I can get a listen?"

"I can do you one better." A moment, and a few discreet beeps later, Eames can hear, if not clearly at least competently, that Ariadne is whispering to Nottingham, cradling him and assuring him, _it's not you, Mr. Nottingham, don't worry, it's not you. They put something in your head, the last time you went under. Themselves. They want to drive you away from your books and take your life. You know it, don't you? In the back of your mind where the stories grow? That's where I'm from, Mr. Nottingham. They kicked me out too._

Eames can't suppress a shudder. He laughs so Yusuf can hear it. "On second thought, perhaps Mr. Cobb wouldn't appreciate the rude awakening."

Yusuf just hisses through his teeth. It's a distinctive enough sound, through the phone.

"What's on the clock?"

Yusuf answers after a moment. "Arthur's not going to signal me until it's time for the kick. I can't say we're behind schedule but we're definitely off it. If anything, it's going too fast."

"Which means we're actually more at Arthur's mercy than mine."

"I think so. You saw how we left things up there. It was like that when we pulled Inception. No matter what you guys were up to, if something went wrong on my level the chain was broken, and I don't know what you guys were dealing with down there but I didn't expect to be dodging Gattling fire with six sleepers in the cab."

"Just like the real world, isn't it?"

"You racist son of a bitch."

"Love you too," Eames says, and kisses the receiver.

It gives him enough space to hear Ariadne again, and Nottingham asking her _where do we have to go?_

It's bad, Ariadne tells him, _but it's in you. You think the stories have dried up, right? It's not that they're dry. It's that they're empty. Stories are like spaces, and you, as the author, fill them and define them. Even if you can't write, you still have stories, Mr. Nottingham. I'm proof that you still have stories. And I can take you back to where they are. I can't fill them up myself. That's something you have to do for me. And then you can get rid of all them, you can let me out—_

That's Eames' cue, isn't it. "Yusuf, I'll be along presently."

"Get as close to the front of the train as you can," Yusuf says, not _good luck,_ not _be safe_. "I'll time your music with mine. Arthur's got me and Dom with a minute to go, his time: you'll hear when I've got ten seconds on mine."

"And ten seconds of yours on my clock is what?"

"Three minutes," Yusuf says. "Three and a half minutes. Less."

"So speed is still the name of the game," Eames says, checking his reflection in the plexiglass window to make sure he still has one. My, but the landscape's fiery tones must do wonders for Arthur's complexion.

"You'll manage," Yusuf says.

"Count on it." Eames hangs up, and wipes the blood off the phone. His forge could stand a bit more gore, so he lets it trail, lets Arthur's shoes leave tracks in it.

He sends the sound of his footsteps ahead, waits for the stertorous buzz of Ariadne's gasp played through the train intercom. _Oh god,_ she says, _the warden's here, we have to go, now!_

Eames opens the doors between the train cars, and kills the lights.

The rest of the dream comes in flashes, in strikes edged with the terror of the scorched earth outside. Ariadne mouthing, _no!_, Nottingham scuttling back through the filth of the aisle, Arthur's long shadow, advancing to kill. In the dark, Eames lets go of the idea, wields it like a knife, grabs Nottingham by the skull and drives it down his throat—

Ariadne kicks the PASIV on. Nottingham falls asleep mid-scream.

"Drop it," Ariadne says, one deep breath in the dark later. "The forge, not Nottingham."

"You'll have to see it again down there," Eames says, but drops it anyway, for her sake. As for Nottingham, he sits the man up in one of the seats, facing wherever this train is bound.

-

Fortunately for Arthur, one of the caches of computer equipment is locked to everyone but him. He can still hear the inmates pounding on the doors, crying out for his blood. Well, he's washed off all he can of theirs, that's for certain, and this is delicate work. He slips down from the air duct, props a chair by it so he can get back up, and gathers up all the headphone wires and TRS couplings he can find. He counts feet. There are enough to cover that distance, if he can connect them in time.

Fifty feet through the air ducts from this room to Yusuf; one length of headphone wires, a minute to create it. Less, thirty-eight feet to Dom, and that length of wire goes faster. Fifteen feet grace each line, done, no problems there, and a TRS splitter for the MP3 player that he already had planned for. It's all here. It's all justifiably here, and only two and a half minutes gone.

Just in case, Arthur brings all of the wire back up into the air vents with him, and makes the shorter route to Dom first, crawling on his elbows as fast as he can. The officer's cap scrapes against the roof of the duct, slows him down. He shucks it off somewhere along the way.

He unscrews the duct over Dom and Miyu's interrogation room, punches it out, and drops down. The very first thing he does is connect Dom's headphones to the extended wire, and tightens them a notch over Dom's ears just in case. Dom is starting to twitch—the sedative is wearing off, they have less time than they think they do. With that done, he goes to the door, and listens.

There's broken glass now, crunching under heels and fists, and the rush of fire. Arthur doesn't even consider what Eames might be doing to Nottingham down there to incense his subconscious this quickly. Nine minutes on the whiteboard condense down to five at the outside down here, and all Arthur can hope is that they know it. He trusts them to, all four them, more than he's trusted anyone he's worked with since taking up with Dom at all.

So he removes one of the screws from the lock on Dom's door, and the barricade he builds won't withstand more than a minute of the riot. He climbs up onto the heap of tables and files and wires to get back into the ceiling, and just keep going.

-

Everything in the house is empty. That's how Ariadne designed it. It's still painful to actually see, even for Eames, who dreams it for her.

Eames is reminded of a joke, or rather, a riddle. _There's a cabin in the woods,_ it goes, _and all the people in it are dead. Why?_ The answer to that riddle, of course, is _the plane crashed_, but in here the riddle's more pertinent to solve. _There's a cabin, no, a mansion in the woods, and all the boxes and bottles and paraphernalia in it are empty. Why?_

It's not supposed to matter to Eames, at least not in any real sense beyond knowing Nottingham. He can, and does, infer, but too much inference is a whole lot of consequence down here, and the last thing any of them want to leave Nottingham with is a house full of ideas that he didn't give himself.

But yes, there's a mansion in the woods, and all the drawers and closets and rooms and panels of the windows are empty, and where there are things at all, they are empty things. Eames nudges open a door without a knob, and it swings on a hinge without a pivot. The floorboards creak and spread, but no mice trundle out, and the holes in the walls only lead to more holes. There are no projections here, and Eames offers Arthur an (empty?) internal thanks for that; only Eames himself, on the highest floor where the monster always ought to be, and Ariadne and Nottingham, in the vacant half-collapsed arch where double doors should be, on the lowest of four stories.

"You remember this, don't you?" Ariadne asks, and her voice doesn't so much echo as snake through the halls, creeping up Eames' spine like a static shock. "I mean, it's different now, but—"

"Yes," Nottingham whispers. _This_ actually reverberates, in the very real sense of each room in the house saying just that, _yes. Yes._ "Yes, I do. I...I didn't build it. But I added to it. All the things are mine."

"Were," Ariadne says. "They were yours." They step into the hall, living silhouettes darker than shadows. The sky must be as empty as the house. Eames keeps behind a pillar, listens more than looks. "This is what they took from you."

Nottingham kneels, to pick something up. From up here, Eames can tell it's a bottle, the kind without a message. The pop of the cork is just as noisy as it would be for a full bottle, but warped, backwards. Once it's open, Nottingham _drops_ it like it's burned him.

Ariadne winces. "That one's used up. You have to find someplace in the house, Mr. Nottingham. It just takes one idea." She breathes deeply, steps forward into the foyer and spreads her arms, looking up where the sockets hang, bereft of bulbs. "This house used to be filled with ideas, didn't it? It had to start with one. But the thing about ideas is that they grow. They fill whatever you put them in and create more of themselves, like seeds. And if it's ivy it climbs, or if it's a tree the roots shove everything else out of the way, and if it's not a plant at all it still grows and spreads and takes you over. That's what it used to be like. And they stopped it. They harvested without sowing."

"I'm the one who didn't sow," Nottingham says.

"Maybe. But they kept you from trying."

She backs through a door and Nottingham follows, but their voices carry out through every room of the house. They're out of sight, so Eames stalks down, letting the echoes swallow his footsteps for now and the ringing of Arthur's forged keys.

"Then what's to stop them from taking it all again?" Nottingham asks. "What if they just come in here and undo it?"

"You can stop them," Ariadne says in the dark. "Plant it here, and plant it in the place it'll grow the fastest. Ideas make you stronger, and the only reason they got in is that you let them start, you _let_ them take it all away."

"I won't now," Nottingham murmurs, and Eames still hears it. "I won't."

They walk out of a room on the third floor—ah, _good_ Ariadne, creating a right tangle—on the opposite side of the foyer from Eames. "It might even be strong enough to let us both out together," she says, and sneaks Eames a glance. The whites of her eyes glint in the dark, like smiles, like fireflies.

Nottingham's already ahead of her now, "How will I know where?"

"It depends on what kind of an idea it is, doesn't it?"

"And how do I know that?"

Eames lets them both hear his next step forward. In fact, he cracks a floorboard, like a proper terror should. The house shivers, and Eames knows that the speeding train one level up has hit a swerve in the track, that it's more than just the tread of the monster.

They see him.

And Ariadne whispers, _"Hurry!"_

Eames wonders if Nottingham will ever stop being chased. They aren't here to fix him after all, and when, if, this succeeds, he will still be an alcoholic writer and possibly (admittedly) a hack. But he'll be a hack with an idea, and one he gave himself, untraceable both to original source and couriers.

Well, first he has to survive the dream. And Ariadne's made that difficult and not, with the rooms that lead to one another on opposite halls, opposite floors. Eames breaks glass every time he steps, splits boards, stains frames without pictures. The shelves are loaded with empty candlesticks and blank books, and they scatter and topple with a swipe of Eames' arm, so empty that they devour the caked blood that peels off Eames', Arthur's, arms. But now Nottingham isn't just running, he's searching, touching the boxes and drawers and panels in the wall, and his right hand has begun to twitch and key. He leaves things behind now, and Ariadne is his eyes, warning him, no, this way—pretty soon Nottingham's the one who can tell when they're close, what paths lead where, and what paths don't lead to Eames and the menace of the keys.

The house shakes from the ground up. The walls of the dream begin to blare, deep and ominous and regular, and Eames lets his Arthur forge smile. Blood chaps on his lips. He counts. Three minutes.

"We have no time!" Every room is filled with Ariadne shouting over the warped, slowed brass that everyone can hear. "Mr. Nottingham, quick—"

"I know where it is," he says, "I know where to go, just help me get there."

"Where?"

"Out," he says, "out and under the house."

-

_There._ Arthur vaults himself back into the air vents and crawls to where he left the MP3 player. From there, it's just a push of the button, and the auditory afterimage of two distant headsets playing the same song quavers on the metal walls. _No,_ Edith Piaf sings, _I regret nothing_, and a minute into the song she will be telling the French Foreign Legion that everything is forgotten and all is well, and Arthur will probably kill himself in an air duct because the riot can't get to him fast enough. He needs to be the first awake. He just has to think of how.

-

Dom almost can't hear the music under the crash of the fifth helicopter. The debris rains onto their propeller and bounces onto the windshield, leaving chips in the glass.

"We're not gonna make it, are we?" Miyu asks. They've been hit pretty hard, sure, or at least the craft has, and given the amount of time Dom knows they have left he still has to make excuses.

He points with the gun turret. "Can you land us on that building over there?" Just as he says it, the wind throws the craft drastically sideways. The propeller slices into glass, and the shards spray like hail. Dom wraps himself around the gun turret and holds on. "Guess not—"

The laptop computer slides down the hangar, smacking Dom in the heels before freefalling.

Miyu's reactions are still delayed, it seems; the shock hits her first, the fact hits her after. But it's slow, slow enough that Dom can see each stretch of her skin to accommodate the muscles getting her up from the pilot's chair. He knows exactly where she's going, exactly what she'll do, and exactly how long he has to pretend to stop her for.

In fact, he lets her jump, so long as he catches her.

The helicopter stutters and quails, spiraling down. Smoke fills the last searchlight and the assault of the city. "I can catch it, I can get it, just let me go—"

And Dom realizes that no, he can't, because she thinks, correctly, that she can fly.

-

"Yes—yes, that door, Mr. Nottingham, go—"

Eames catches up with Ariadne and yanks her into the shadows, clamps a hand over her mouth. He whispers, into her ear so it doesn't echo, _keep trying to scream. Twenty seconds._ She nods, and he can feel her teeth drag on his palm, the froth at the corner of her lips reanimating the dried blood.

But out the door, he sees Nottingham furiously digging, prying up the stairs of the mansion's porch, clawing at the earth. His hands leave raised tracks at his sides, and there, there is a crushed paper box, like the ones for pre-grown plants, fused open by function if not form. It's empty, of course, and the house echoes with Nottingham's ragged exhale.

Nottingham puts his hand in—the one that shakes, the one that on every level up connects him to the PASIV—and shuts the lid.

-

Yusuf derails the train. Dom lets Miyu drag him out of the helicopter. The convicts tear down Arthur's barricades and descend on the sleepers like hyenas, ripping them apart.

And when up in the air vent, Arthur hears the first real scream—Ariadne's—he pulls the sharp stripped wires tight around his neck.

-

"You are five minutes early," Saitoh says when Arthur untangles himself from Eames' cot, pushes himself to his feet and disconnects himself from the PASIV.

"Closer to six and not on this clock. First one up draws the curtain," he says, and does just that, building a curtained wall between Nottingham and Miyu's respective cots. "Get Miyu's legs taken care of if you haven't already. Who else is awake?"

"I am," Yusuf says. And he's not the only one either, Dom's up off the floor, and the cushion of Ariadne's chair squeaks, hisses in air when she gets to her feet.

"That makes all of us," Eames says, legs already swung off the bed. "And them, it seems." He disconnects Nottingham with a sharp, unrepentant tug.

Orderlies wheel Miyu out; Saitoh _has_ done as he promised and, between the ambulance ride over and the short time they've spent under, Miyu's legs have been at least cleaned and given first aid. Nottingham stirs—everyone but Saitoh gets out of the room as fast as they can, and down the hospital hall. They split up as soon as they get to the long row of elevators, and by the time Arthur sets his briefcase in the backseat of a cab, he knows he won't see the others for two days at least.

He has the cab drop him off on 59th street, and pays a hansom driver to take him once around the park. He focuses on the steady trot of the horse's hooves at the expense of the city, and lets that help him down. When he can count again, he subdivides the beats. Quarter equals one-twenty, eighty, sixty, forty on the turns.

-

"Of course it's not supposed to matter," Eames says, several days later. He hands the conductor back the ticket, but ignores that entirely and keeps addressing Arthur, across from him in the facing blue vinyl seats. "None of it is, really. Not even whether we succeeded. The accounts reflect what they should."

"Then why are we here?" The conductor punched Arthur's ticket the same time as Eames', so Arthur is also tucking his away, in a slide of his billfold.

"Closure." Eames winks at him, doesn't get the ruffled hackles he'd hoped for. Ah, well. "Obviously we can't do this again, or advertise this service—inasmuch as we can advertise anything, that is—if we don't know how effective it is."

"Fair enough," Arthur says after a while. "You're sure he's on this train?"

"No, Darling, I only wanted to take you on a pleasure trip."

"Where, Saratoga?"

"The possibility had occurred to me."

"That's a little farther north than you think."

"So we'll spend a lot of time on trains," Eames offers, and leans over his knees. "I'm surprised you're so amenable."

"I'm surprised you think I wouldn't be," Arthur says, insufferably deadpan and without innuendo that Eames can perceive.

"Smashing," Eames says, and tries to put said innuendo back in where it belongs. "It just didn't seem within the realm of your precious plausibility."

"I gamble the same as you, I just play the odds instead of throwing them." Arthur looks over Eames' shoulder. "He's here."

Eames nods. "What's he doing?"

"Sitting down," Arthur says sourly, turning up his palms in a shrug, a _well that's obvious._ "Taking out his laptop." The announcer goes through his motions on the intercom. "Taking a drink of whatever's in that paper bag. I think it's a 40. Typing."

"Well that's a good sign." Once the train pulls out into the dark tunnels under Grand Central, Eames turns around and smiles, and shifts his voice into the nondescript New York one. "Oh, ha, I get to do this again! Bradley, come on!"

Arthur mouths, _Bradley?_, and struggles when Eames tugs him out of the seat, but that's not standing in Eames' way dragging him up the aisle.

"Mr. Nottingham?" Eames asks, leaning over with all the enthusiasm he can muster. "Mr. Nottingham, hey! I'm glad you're out of the hospital. Uh, you signed my book on this train, just a couple of weeks ago?"

Nottingham startles but doesn't up from his computer, at least not much. "Oh! Oh, right. You're...Milton?"

"Mervin," Eames corrects. "This is so awesome. I told you to sign it to both of us, right?" he adds, and slinks an arm around Arthur's waist to pull him close. "Well, now your biggest fan finally gets to meet you."

_Now_ Nottingham looks up. It takes him about a second to see, long enough for the train to have one of those requisite blackouts before they surface on the other side of the Hudson. The sheer terror on Nottingham's face is almost comical, at least to Eames.

"...Hi," Arthur says, and if the doubt is real, at least it's effective.

"Wow," Nottingham says, barely a breath. "Wow. This is...this is something else." He takes a moment, and then smiles. "This is going in the book."

"You're writing?" Eames asks.

"Yeah, and well, I hate to say this but you—Bradley, I mean—your look's just right for the villain. It just surprised me, that's all. I don't mean any offense."

"None taken," Arthur says, edging out of the circle of Eames' arm. "What do you mean, though?"

"Well, it occurred to me the other day. Did you know there used to be a paramilitary organization that specialized in dream infiltration?"

Eames still has his fingertips on Arthur's back, so he can feel the chill race up Arthur's already cold spine.

Nottingham goes on, and goes back to typing, "So when the organization broke up years ago, of course they couldn't get rid of the technology, that never happens. But I found some Japanese sites that advertised the technology for commercial use. But it's definitely out there. So I'm writing about people who use that technology to steal dreams. Intellectual contraband. Things like that. It's all a bit hazy, but I think I'll work it out."

Arthur has his hand in his pocket. Eames should probably follow his example.

-

Dom begins to rub out the chart, not bothering with the cloth eraser.

"Mr. Nottingham's representatives are quite pleased with us," Saitoh is saying. "Are you?"

  
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-


End file.
